1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ophthalmic photographing or imaging apparatus for imaging a tomographic image of an eye by optical coherence tomography.
2. Related Art
An ophthalmic photographing apparatus including an optical coherence tomography (OCT) can obtain a tomographic image of an eye (e.g., a tomographic image of a fundus). The obtained tomographic image is used for evaluation of a condition of the eye (see Patent Document 1).
To obtain a panoramic image of a fundus, a fundus camera sequentially captures front images of an eye by moving a fixation target to thereby guide the eye to look at any of different target positions. The obtained front images are joined together to create the panoramic image (see Patent Document 2).
Further, in the OCT in Patent Document 3, a fixation target is moved to guide an eye to look at any of different target positions and three-dimensional tomographic images are sequentially imaged to obtain a panoramic image consisting of the three-dimensional tomographic images. Then, the obtained three-dimensional tomographic images are joined together to create the panoramic image.
In the case of obtaining a tomographic image of a peripheral part of an eye by use of the OCT, the eye is more likely to be unsteady as compared with imaging of a center part of the eye, and thus it is hard to image the peripheral part. The obtained tomographic image of the peripheral part with positional displacement or shift could not be joined smoothly with the tomographic image of the center part because of a difference in imaging position.